Trends Identified
Brands won’t be able to stay neutral.
Consumers and employees increasingly expect companies to take a position on the day’s issues and live their values, says Blackbird CEO Ross Martin. “You’re forced, as a company, as a leader, to stand for something, otherwise everyone will know you stand for nothing,” he warns. “You won’t be hated, you’ll become completely irrelevant, and the people who worked for you, won’t work for you anymore because you didn’t stand up when it mattered.” These expectations will only intensify in 2019, agrees Marianne Cooper, senior research scholar at Stanford and the lead researcher on Lean In. “To prepare, leaders need to get clear on their own and their company’s values, decide which issues make the most sense to weigh in on, and pre-plan how they will respond — or at least establish a process for dealing with situations that need a rapid response.”
2018
50 Big Ideas for 2019: What to watch in the year ahead
LinkedIn
Hotels will take away your alarm clock.
“It used to be a real treat to go to a hotel because they had things you didn’t have at home," says Marriott International’s global chief development officer, Anthony Capuano. "We have everything at home today!” And we expect those things to work at the hotel too, whether that’s connecting our own devices to the TV screen or continuing a Netflix show where we left it back home. Meanwhile, the technologies we no longer use that hotels have stubbornly held onto are finally disappearing. Bye bye alarm clocks and landline phones!
2018
50 Big Ideas for 2019: What to watch in the year ahead
LinkedIn
Employers will make room for neurodiversity.
Neurodiversity refers to the inclusion of people with all sorts of cognitive abilities and patterns, from ADHD and dyslexia to people on the autism spectrum. It is coming to workplaces as the chronological consequence of a cultural and scientific shift in the 1990s; conditions once seen as pathologies to be medicalized became differences society should embrace. “You have a whole generation of people who were much more rigorously diagnosed entering the workforce now,” says Ed Thompson, founder of Uptimize, an organization that helps employers attract, hire and retain neurodivergent talent. Add to that a “chronic war for talent,” he says, which is prompting recruiters to look beyond their usual demographics, and neurodiversity is “becoming a category of workplace [diversity and inclusion] that a lot of people are talking about in a way that wasn’t true even a year ago.”
2018
50 Big Ideas for 2019: What to watch in the year ahead
LinkedIn
Drugmakers will double down on China.
In 2018, that investment translated into pharmaceutical partnerships with leading Chinese companies like health insurer Ping An (Sanofi), e-commerce giant Alibaba (Merck Group) and tech conglomerate Tencent (Novartis). Not only is the country the second largest pharmaceuticals market for many companies now, China itself is rethinking its approach to medicines. It published its first list of rare diseases six months ago, and a new drug approval process may result in new therapies from Chinese drugmakers, too. “Our experiences there are going to drive how we reimagine health care,” predicts Novartis’ Vas Narasimhan, who took over as CEO in early 2018.
2018
50 Big Ideas for 2019: What to watch in the year ahead
LinkedIn
Your next vacation may be to space or undersea.
Ok, maybe not “next” vacation unless you’re a very occasional traveler. But in 2019, NASA will start building its Lunar Space Station and we’ll see continued investment in private spaceflight, predicts Glenn Fogel, CEO of Booking Holdings. His company compiled data-driven travel insights from its millions of reviews and bookings. Until space becomes an option, “travelers are seeking out uncharted territories in other forms, with 60% of travelers confirming they’d want to stay in an accommodation under the sea,” Fogel writes. Gen Z and Y travelers are also bringing their values with them and seeking environmentally-friendly and socially-conscious experiences, often opting for shorter, nearer trips. The hot new destinations? The Bahamas, Florence, Palm Springs and Cartagena.
2018
50 Big Ideas for 2019: What to watch in the year ahead
LinkedIn
We will stop living an Insta life.
The social media honeymoon is over. As people question their screen addiction, the impacts are felt in all walks of life, from dinners where guests demand the phones be put away to changing trends in the beauty industry. “In 2019, people are looking to scale back, simplify their routine and their look,” says Melissa Butler, founder and CEO of The Lip Bar, after years where trends were set by Instagram influencers and elaborate makeup tutorials on Youtube. “Social media has played such a big part in pressuring us to show up in a certain way. People are looking to reconnect with who they are, go back to the basics.”
2018
50 Big Ideas for 2019: What to watch in the year ahead
LinkedIn
Millennials are the largest adult generation in the United States, but they are starting to share the spotlight with Generation Z.
This year, Millennials, those ages 23 to 38, will outnumber Baby Boomers (ages 55 to 73), according to Census Bureau projections. Now in their young adulthood, Millennials are more educated, more racially and ethnically diverse and slower to marry than previous generations were at the same age. But after growing up in the Great Recession, their economic picture is mixed: Young adult households are earning more than most older Americans did at the same age, but have less wealth than Boomers did at the same age, partly because they are more likely to have higher amounts of student loan debt. Although the nation’s 73 million Millennials are the largest living adult generation, the next one – Generation Z – is entering adulthood. Also known as the post-Millennials, Gen Zers (those born after 1996 – ages 7 to 22 for this analysis) are on track to be the best educated and most diverse generation yet. Nearly half of Gen Zers (48%) are racial or ethnic minorities. Socially and politically, their liberal-leaning opinions on key issues are similar to those of Millennials.
2019
6 demographic trends shaping the U.S. and the world in 2019
Pew Research Center
Hispanics are projected to be the largest racial or ethnic minority group in the U.S. electorate when voters cast their ballots next year.
The number of eligible voters who are Hispanic (32 million) is projected to surpass that of black eligible voters (30 million) for the first time, according to Pew Research Center projections based on data from the U.S. Census Bureau. However, voter turnout will play an important role in the influence of different racial and ethnic groups. In past elections, black voter turnout substantially surpassed Hispanic voter turnout. The projections indicate that whites will account for two-thirds of the electorate, a declining share. As the nation’s demographics are changing, so are those of Congress, though not as rapidly, according to a February 2019 Pew Research Center analysis. Nonwhites have risen to 22% of Congress, and women are a record 24% of voting lawmakers (a share that matches the average in legislatures worldwide). The share of immigrants in Congress has ticked up, but at 3% remains short of historical highs and far below the foreign-born share of the total U.S. population (13.6% as of 2017). An influx of younger representatives is having a small impact on the median age of the House of Representatives, according to a November 2018 analysis.
2019
6 demographic trends shaping the U.S. and the world in 2019
Pew Research Center
The American family continues to change.
"A growing share of parents are unmarried. Among parents living with a child, the share who are unmarried increased from 7% in 1968 to 25% in 2017. Part of this increase is due to a growing share of unmarried parents cohabiting, as 35% of unmarried parents were in 2017. Over the same period, the share of U.S. children living with an unmarried parent more than doubled, from 13% in 1968 to 32% in 2017. Stay-at-home parents account for about one-in-five parents (18%), which is roughly similar to 25 years ago, despite some fluctuation in the intervening years. For some parents, caring for a child isn’t their only responsibility: 12% of all parents with a child younger than 18 at home are also caring for an adult. Lifetime fertility for women is ticking up. The share of women at the end of their childbearing years who have ever given birth is rising and is now similar to what it was in the early 1990s. While American women are having their children later in life than in the past, they are still doing so earlier (and have more children) than women in many other developed nations. Americans generally see change on the horizon when it comes to the future of the family, according to a Pew Research Center survey. A majority of Americans (53%) say that people will be less likely to get married in the year 2050, and 46% say people will be less likely to have children than they are now. Even today, 71% of parents younger than age 50 say they are unlikely to have more kids in the future, while 37% of childless adults of the same age say they are unlikely to ever have kids, according to another survey by the Center."
2019
6 demographic trends shaping the U.S. and the world in 2019
Pew Research Center
The immigrant share of the U.S. population is approaching a record high but remains below that of many other countries.
The 44 million foreign-born people living in the U.S. in 2017 accounted for 13.6% of the population, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of the American Community Survey. That is the highest share since 1910, when immigrants were 14.7% of the total population. The record share was in 1890, when immigrants were 14.8% of the total. According to United Nations data, 25 nations and territories have higher shares of immigrants than the U.S. They include some Persian Gulf nations with high shares of temporary labor migrants, as well as Australia (29%), New Zealand (23%) and Canada (21%). The role of the U.S. in accepting refugees has diminished, according to an analysis of data from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. The number of refugees resettled in the U.S. – 33,000 in 2017 – decreased more than in any other country over the previous year. The same year also marked the first time since the adoption of the 1980 U.S. Refugee Act that the U.S. resettled fewer refugees than all other countries combined (69,000).In most top destination countries for migrants, majorities of people say immigrants strengthen their countries rather than burden them, according to a 2018 Pew Research Center survey of 18 countries that host half of the world’s migrants. Immigrants were viewed positively in 10 of those nations, including the U.S., Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Canada and Australia. Majorities in five countries viewed immigrants as a burden: Hungary, Greece, South Africa, Russia and Israel.
2019
6 demographic trends shaping the U.S. and the world in 2019
Pew Research Center